August 27, 2016
“American soldiers had seized Saddam Hussein’s opulent Republican Palace in some of the fiercest fighting of the entire Iraq War. Iraq was smoldering in ruins, “conquered” by President George W. Bush. Its cities bombed out”
August 27, 2016
“Joining American Special Forces as they sorted through the rubble of the fortress—once the sex and porn parlor of one of Saddam’s two sadistic sons, Uday—was a select group of employees of the San Francisco–based construction company Bechtel. “This place is surreal,” Bechtel’s Thor Christiansen said of the sumptuousness of the grounds now occupied by the “Bechtelians,” who were overseeing the US government’s $3 billion job to rebuild war-torn Iraq.”
August 27, 2016
“An ironic shrine to American culture and excess—from the stockpile of Kentucky bourbon to the Playboy Mansion–inspired pleasure palace—Saddam’s headquarters was an emulation of Western greed and imperialism. Most mocking of all was that Bechtel—the privately held, secretive American corporation that epitomized the extreme and unfettered capitalism that Saddam claimed to loathe—was now rooted in the heart of his kingdom.”
August 27, 2016
“US construction giant Bechtel National Inc. arrived in Iraq in April 2003, along with US troops, even before President Bush had declared the war over, and with the first lucrative government contract to rebuild the country. The influx of Bechtel engineers into Baghdad came immediately after the bombing of Saddam’s palace. Bush had launched the reconstruction of Iraq a week after the invasion, and Bechtel was the primary recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars of government contracts with its profits guaranteed. ”
August 27, 2016
“Bechtel received the coveted contract as the principal vehicle to fix the entire Iraqi infrastructure: the power grid, water supply, sewage system, roads, bridges, seaport, airports, hospitals, and schools. The government’s decision to waive competitive bidding under the aegis of “national security” provoked little attention among lawmakers or the media in the United States, though European allies criticized as “exceptionally maladroit” the unseemliness of inviting bids from “only well-connected domestic companies.” For Bechtel, it was business as usual. Due to its relationship with Dick Cheney, Halliburton received most of the “contractor” and conflict of interest attention during the war. This, ironically, on the whole, left Bechtel overlooked by the media.”
August 27, 2016
“Priding itself as the company that can “build anything, any place, any time,” Bechtel grew from a scrappy Nevada road-grading operation at the dawn of the twentieth century to the world’s largest construction company. Initially established in a geography inhospitable to humans, Bechtel became the prototype for taming remote and forbidding landscapes as exemplified by its historic signature project, Hoover Dam. “The bigger, the tougher the job, the better we like it,” company president Stephen Bechtel once bragged to Fortune.”
August 27, 2016
“ As the leading engineering and construction firm in America, Bechtel has reaped billions in profits, thanks to its quasi-government posture, an unprecedented revolving door between its San Francisco headquarters and Washington’s inner sanctums, and a business model based on federal contracts that are antithetical to the company’s free-enterprise espousals.”
August 27, 2016
“Its wielding of unelected power is a cautionary tale, although unheeded by a nation that in recent decades embraced private concentration over public distribution of wealth. Still, for all its outsize ambitions and profits, the family empire has been ruled by stunningly prosaic figures.
To comprehend this system of revolving-door capitalism and the part the Bechtel family has played in it, one must go back to the company’s regional western beginnings. It is a classic American story of money and power, bootstraps and courage, brawn and genius.
Or at least that’s the myth of the Bechtel family dynasty.”
August 27, 2016
“Bechtel Group Inc. grew after the mysterious death in 1933 of its founding patriarch, Warren A. “Dad” Bechtel. Dad, who first determined to “break” the Colorado River as if it were a wild horse, and who, with primitive mastery of the steam shovel, had built the founding fortune, left no succession plan. His three sons—Warren Jr., Stephen, and Kenneth—vied for control of the family company.”
August 27, 2016
“It has built 17,000 miles of roads, eighty ports and harbors, 6,200 miles of railway, a hundred tunnels, fifty hydroelectric plants, thirty bridges, and twenty-five entire communities, including the futuristic Saudi Arabian city of Jubail—a $20 billion project hailed as the largest project in construction history.”
August 27, 2016
“A leader in the liquefied natural gas market, Bechtel has built a third of the world’s liquefaction capacity, not only throughout America but also in Australia, Egypt, Algeria, and Russia. ”
October 2, 2016
“Indeed, the succeeding generations of Bechtel men have navigated—if not designed—the powerful and profitable symbiosis between government and industry. Politically reactionary, the family has long been identified with the Republican Party. Like their archconservative corporate peers, they advocate a consolidated, freewheeling capitalistic, monopolistic economy unrestrained by government oversight or taxation.”
October 2, 2016
“Despite its fiercely antiregulatory, antigovernment stance, the Bechtel family owes its entire fortune to the US government, dating back to its first Depression-era construction projects in the western United States. ”
October 2, 2016
“Western builders will build the Hoover-Boulder Dam, a Western project in the West for the West,” gloated the Pacific Builder in 1931 when a Bechtel-led California-based consortium won the historic US Bureau of Reclamation contract.”
October 2, 2016
“Dad Bechtel’s “single most remarkable achievement up to that time was the invention of a folding toothbrush that fit neatly into a vest pocket.” Two years later, he would derive $2 million in profits (roughly $600 million in today’s terms), and his company would suddenly be one of the preeminent engineering and construction firms in the world.”
October 15, 2016
“A “tall, beefy man with a bull-like roar,” Warren Augustine Bechtel, whose legacy would be one of the greatest engineering achievements in American history, came into the world on September 12, 1872.”
October 15, 2016
“
“I landed in Reno with a wife and two babies, a slide trombone, and a ten-dollar bill,” Warren later recalled. ”
October 15, 2016
“He found a job there as an estimator for the Southern Pacific, earning $59 a month. “He was learning all the time, but he seemed to me a natural engineer,” his supervisor later recalled. ”
October 15, 2016
“A series of jobs ensued from which Warren acquired technical experience in lieu of a formal education. From Wadsworth, he moved to Lovelock, Nevada, where he became a gravel pit superintendent at a quarry. He, his wife, and two young sons were a familiar sight at the primitive migrant job sites. He soon acquired the nickname “Dad,” as his ubiquitous brood called him.”
October 15, 2016
“By 1906, Dad was ready to strike out on his own. At thirty-four years old, he obtained his first subcontract with the Western Pacific Railroad, building a line between Pleasanton and Sunol. This independent undertaking marked the birth of the modern Bechtel company.”
October 15, 2016
“When he purchased the imposing machine, thanks to a loan from his well-to-do father-in-law, his company was officially launched. His steam shovel was in great demand, and he undertook ever-larger railroad projects while expanding into building roads, tunnels, bridges, and dams. In large white block script, he stenciled “W. A. BECHTEL CO.” onto the red cab door. It would be another sixteen years before he would formally incorporate his business. ”
October 15, 2016
“At a yard in San Leandro, he retrofitted 1912 model Packards and Alcos with dump bodies. Referred to later as the “coming of age” period for the Bechtel organization, the completion of the last 106-mile stretch of the Northwestern Pacific line signaled the beginning of the company’s rise. “I never expected to have that much money in a lifetime,” the unlettered son of a small-town grocer confided to a friend upon receiving his nearly $500,000 payment.”
October 15, 2016
“A stickler for verbal agreements and handshake deals with his associates—“When you can’t trust a man’s word, you can’t trust his signature,” he would declare—he also insisted on fifty-fifty partnerships. “Dad had no patience with 51-49 arrangements,” a former partner once said. “He used to say ‘No man with a sense of self-respect wants to be controlled on that kind of percentage.’ ”
October 30, 2016
“Built at the height of the Great Depression, under the most harrowing and inhumane conditions, by the country’s hungriest men, Hoover Dam was a towering metaphor for the overwhelming challenges facing a desperate nation. Conceived by a river runner, designed by a civil engineer, facilitated by an indecisive president and hostile Congress, brutally micromanaged by an arrogant contractor, overseen by a handful of calculating corporate titans, and built by circus acrobats and Indian skywalkers, the feat was a historic convergence of implausible circumstances.”
November 9, 2016
“ Naysayers feared that the weight of the lake created by the dam would provoke massive tremors and “unleash a flood of biblical proportions.” One engineer recalled, “We were all scared stiff.”
November 9, 2016
“America had hit rock bottom, the national unemployment rate soaring to 25 percent. One out of every four heads of household were out of work. Millions wandered from state to state in search of a job, and when word spread of the dam construction, they poured into Nevada in droves. Within weeks, more than ten thousand prospective workers were loitering around the train depot and the temporary Six Companies headquarters in downtown Las Vegas, resembling what one account called a “hobo jungle.” They would compete for fifteen hundred jobs. ”
December 25, 2016
“In early August 1933, accompanied by his wife and daughter, Dad set sail from New York City bound for France and then on to Austria by train. He left Clara and Alice in Vienna—apparently under instruction from Soviet authorities that he travel alone to the Russian capital. Once in Moscow, he spent three productive days and nights at the historic National Hotel near the heart of Red Square and the fortified Kremlin. He got on well with his Russian hosts, by all accounts, but on the fourth night before he was to depart for Kiev, he died suddenly in his hotel room from what the New York Times described as “an overdose of a medicine which he had been taking for several years on doctors’ orders.” Just fifteen days shy of his sixty-first birthday, the legendarily tough and robust Bechtel fell into what his family would later characterize as a diabetic coma from an insulin overdose. “Fumbling with a syringe, he injected himself with insulin, something Clara had always done,” according to one account of the death. “Whether through unfamiliarity or grogginess,” he gave himself too much and slipped into death on the night of August 28, 1933.”
December 25, 2016
“At the time of Dad’s death, lawyers were preparing for a legal battle. But Warren and Ken deferred to the more tenacious Steve, and named him president of the company. “They wanted me to lead, and naturally, I was glad to do it,” he told an interviewer somewhat disingenuously.”
December 25, 2016
“The ancient Western dream of an advanced industrial economy controlled at home and able to compete nationally is brighter now than it has ever been,” historian Bernard De Voto wrote in a 1946 Harper’s essay about the modern-day miracle of the Six Companies consortium. From Hoover Dam on through World War II, Bechtel and what Fortune magazine called the “lusty, uninhibited men” of Six Companies—sometimes individually, sometimes together—pursued a moneymaking, precedent-setting confederacy with the US government. By the end of the 1930s, following political turmoil in Europe, the federal government began focusing on national defense, and Six Companies would transition from earthmovers and dam builders to industrialists with billion-dollar defense contracts. Of all the Six Companies principals, Bechtel would be positioned to profit the most handsomely, landing the lucrative shipbuilding contracts that would make Steve a central figure in the American war industry. In the early 1940s, Bechtel and his associates thrust themselves into the top echelons of America’s shipbuilding and steel works. Leading into World War II, they shrewdly maneuvered into the key recipients of US military contracts.”
December 26, 2016
“They concocted a scheme that would serve as the prototype for Bechtel’s famous “turnkey” contract. For a fixed fee, the company would design a project, build it, and deliver it to the owner complete at a set date, and ready to turn the key and start operating. The concept of a negotiated contract rather than a bid contract would be the company’s signature for decades to come. It was an outgrowth of Steve’s philosophy to free the firm from competitive bidding and to control the entire project. “The client benefits because this arrangement makes possible the close coordination of engineering, procurement, and construction with the continuity needed to deliver the most plant in the least time,” Steve described it. “We like responsibility. We have organized and prepared for i”
December 26, 2016
“In 1939 Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, and by June 1940, Nazi Germany controlled Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Luxembourg, and France and was preparing to launch an air assault on Great Britain. It didn’t take any “great foresight,” as the company’s internal history put it, to see that America would soon be drawn into the war in Europe. “Like others, the Bechtels were alert to the implications and lost no time getting their resources ready for the country’s service.” Two years earlier, Bechtel and McCone had studied the shipbuilding industry, envisioning a new market that “seemed about ripe to become a big-volume business,” Steve would say”
December 26, 2016
“Bechtel-McCone had first moved overseas with the construction of the far-flung naval bases stretching ten thousand miles from Alameda, California, through Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines. During the war, the firm had also built refineries in Saudi Arabia for the Arabian American Oil Co. (Aramco), as well as the entire Aramco headquarters city at Dhahran, and railroads, port facilities, and highway systems for the Saudi royal family.”
December 26, 2016
“McCone’s move into the highest circles of government—first in defense and atomic energy, and ultimately in intelligence as director of the CIA—marked the genesis of the infamous “revolving door” that would define the Bechtel business model for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.”
December 26, 2016
“Steve formed a series of new corporate entities under his total control. He broke the family’s long-standing ties with Henry Kaiser and other Six Companies executives and brought in a new team of professional managers. Like-minded in temperament and vision, Steve’s men mirrored his conservative values: stalwart churchgoers, Boy Scouts loyalists, and earnest teetotalers. Native Californians who were educated primarily at Berkeley and Stanford, they were “hardworking WASP Republicans with equally hardworking WASP Republican wives,” a journalist observed. The Bechtelians were a colorless, sober bunch. “They are not always the easiest people to deal with—you wouldn’t want to go out for a drink with them after work,” a corporate insider once told a newspaper. “But they get the job done.”
December 28, 2016
“Steve was invested and McCone was the second-largest stockholder—had discovered this ostensibly inexhaustible supply of fossil fuels. As a result, SOCAL received an exclusive fifty-year right to search for oil across 395,000 square miles. Bechtel prepared to transform primitive Saudi Arabia—the most oil-rich nation on earth—into “a country that could match any in the world with highways, utilities, airports, and the other manifestations of modernity.”
December 28, 2016
“Steve was prepared to tackle what he saw as the biggest job since Hoover Dam—the Trans-Arabian Pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. “This thirty-inch, four-hundred-thousand-barrel-per-day line will be the mightiest pipeline ever laid,” Steve crowed to company managers, “bigger than any oil line yet completed and almost as long as the Big Inch line running from Texas to New York.”
December 28, 2016
“As oil flowed during the late 1940s, the Bechtel Corporation negotiated a cost-plus contract with the Saudi government to undertake an ambitious plan, influenced by Washington, to help lift the kingdom into the modern capitalist age,” wrote Coll. The company so mirrored the CIA by participating in intelligence gathering and providing cover to CIA agents that it was widely considered a government surrogate, if not a full-fledged government enterprise by both the political leaders of the countries in which it operated, as well as by its rivals in industry.”
Notes From: Sally Denton. “The Profiteers.” iBooks.
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